Hannah A. Matangos

Technologies of Illumination

Dissertation for the Ph.D. in German Literature & Culture / Visual Studies at Penn State

The intersection of art and technology since the 20th century has necessitated a rethinking of aesthetics, spectatorship, and the purpose of art itself as a medium of illumination.  My dissertation, tentatively entitled Technologies of Illumination in the 20th- and 21st-Century Avant-gardes, examines the multifaceted revolutions and futures envisioned by artists working with light-based media from the Bauhaus to the postwar period to today.  Overall, how do light-based media lend themselves to socioeconomic revolution, environmental awareness, and action?

From light bulbs, cameras, and exposed film to digital media and video games, I explore how these technologies function as what I call “technologies of illumination,” illuminating networked dimensions of power and aesthetics in the contemporary moment and possible futures. My artistic interlocutors include László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, Peter Kubelka, Valie EXPORT, Mara Mattuschka, Hito Steyerl, and Anne-Marie Schleiner. As I explore the changing conditions and consequences of visibility from the early 20th century to today, I draw on a variety of thinkers, including Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Ariella Azoulay, Paul Virilio, Jonathan Crary, and Donna Haraway, to name just a few.  My research will also rely heavily on archival documents, exhibition catalogues, artist statements, and artworks themselves.  Overall, I argue that technologies of illumination reveal the complexities of modern existence and its imbrication in biopolitical, capitalistic systems of the Anthropocene and (digital) culture(s) of militarism.

I seek to foster active, critical viewership vis-à-vis media and an awareness of one’s own positionality within systems of power and their potentials to change.  I will be constructing a companion website for my dissertation, documenting transhistorical social, political, and aesthetic connections between my surveyed artists. Little scholarship has put these artists in dialogue with each other, and such an archive can benefit other scholars creating projects focused on art, modernity, technology, and collectivity.  Thus, my dissertation seeks to be a work of both scholarship and activism, fostering a public archive for like-minded scholars and solidifying the task of art now in critiquing the ethical dimensions of the interplay between technologies of illumination, power, and politics.  Read my prospectus linked in the sidebar for more information.